Fishies

This is just to give you a visual, in case you didn’t know what a fishie looks like.

In all this thinking I’ve been doing (1, 2) about what I call half-mockingly and half-seriously my “Hyperactive Conscious Mind Disorder (HCMD),” there is one thing that keeps bothering me: What the heck does a “hyperactive conscious mind” even mean?

“Consciousness” and “mind” and “thought” are terms that give philosophers and scientists and, ahem, bloggers headaches. I’m not even going to attempt definitions, but I want to be able to express what I think is weird about me in terms that others – and more importantly *I* (sorry) – can understand. I’ll try to explain using a simplifying analogy:

A mind is like your own personal lake with a bunch of fish (thoughts) in it. “You” are in a rowboat on top of the lake, maybe or maybe not looking in the water in an attempt to identify and explain to others or to yourself what kind of fish are in there. Unfortunately, you don’t have a net or a fishing pole, so the best you can do is passively observe the fish when they come close enough to the surface.

A “conscious thought,” then, is simply being able to kind of see a fish when it comes nearish the surface, however faintly or obscured, while an “unconscious thought” is the vast majority of other fish that are nowhere near the surface or nowhere near your boat and that you don’t even know are there.

Skip the next three paragraphs if you don’t like asides.

• Aside I: This analogy explains why I have a problem with the “conscious” vs. “unconscious” dichotomy: What the dichotomy is essentially saying is that you either see a fish or you don’t, and that’s fine and true, but the more important consideration is how well you’re seeing the fish. Sometimes the water may be especially clear and a fish may come hover at the surface right next to your boat, but most of the time the water is kind of muddy and the fish is too far away or a little too deep or moving too fast to be able to get a good look at it. In other words, it’s not an either/or, conscious thought or not sort of thing; there are varying degrees of consciousness.


• Aside II: Writing (and, to a lesser extent, speaking) is like trying to make a painting of a fish given only a quick, obscured glimpse of it. A good painter may be able to paint something beautiful and ornate and real-looking, but that’s quite a bit different from saying that they got a good look at the fish and they painted it accurately. In other words, there are no constraints on how beautiful or real-seeming a piece of writing is, but there are sure as hell constraints on how accurately the painting represents what is going on inside of you[r lake]. And this is not even to mention the problem that other people have to look at your painting and try to see it the same way that you do.


• Aside III: To extend the analogy some more, maybe the events and information we encounter in regular everyday life – the stimuli – are like dropping certain kinds of bread crumbs or worms or canned vegetables or whatever into the lake thereby encouraging certain bread crumb-loving or worm-loving fish to come make an appearance at the surface. Point being that certain fish are influenced to show themselves based on our experiences, but there’s no way of predicting which or how many fish that will be. The only thing we can say with some confidence is that the fishes who come to the surface to collect crumbs are usually the most dominant bully fish—it’s harder to get a good look at the smaller, more timid ones except by staying still (not tossing out any crumbs) and waiting patiently.

Okay, back to the main thread: How do I explain my “HCMD” in terms of this analogy? It’s a two-parter: (1) I suspect I notice an unusually large number of fish swimming around nearish the surface, and (2) I am weirdly interested in looking at those fish. Maybe all of the fish I notice is a sign that I have a lake especially stocked with fish, but more likely it means that there is something fucked up about the pH levels of my lake that is causing a bunch of fish to hang out nearish the surface. Or it may just mean that I see more because I’m looking more, like my eyes have adjusted to the dark.

Here’s what it DOESN’T mean: It doesn’t mean that I get a clearer look at my fish than anyone else (and I may even get a worse look because they seem to be swimming around pretty frantically). And it doesn’t mean that my fish are any more beautiful or admirable or worthy of looking at than anyone else’s. And it doesn’t mean that I have ADD where I’m trying to look at one fish but get distracted by another (in fact, I’m pretty comfortable staring at one fish for awhile, but eventually, considering all the options, I just get bored with it and want to move on—but unlike ADD, it’s typically a willful moving on).

Here’s what it probably does mean: It means that it’s hard for me to get to know any particular fish very well because I regularly get the itch to move on to a newer, more exciting one. It means that I’m unusually comfortable being alone in my rowboat, staring at my fucked up fish. It means that I’m less interested or less willing to do things that don’t involve staring at fish, like, I don’t know, sitting in other people’s rowboats. I’m interested in finding out what kind of fish they have and how they compare to my own, but it’s hard for me to just be there in their rowboat, paying attention to them, rather than fish. (And yes, there is a big difference between paying attention to a person and paying attention to their thoughts.)

I’m mostly pleased with that analogy and how I described it, except for one big part: A “thought” is not like a fish. Comparing it to a fish gives the impression that a thought is this ornate, uniform, and coherent creature that you can get to know intimately if you just study it hard enough. Um, no. Actually a “thought” is just a haphazard collection of brain cells firing in response to stimuli, giving rise to a murky and incoherent set of images and words (or whatever). So you’re right to feel that your thoughts are confusing and incoherent and unknowable.

The main point I’m trying to make with the analogy is that, for whatever reason (either because my lake is fatly stocked or, more likely, because the pH levels are out of whack, or because my eyes have adjusted to the dark), I suspect I notice an unusually high number of thoughts, and I suspect that I am unusually amused just sitting there noticing them.

Maybe a more important point is that noticing the fish is kind of optional. The “fish” will be there and will do their thing and we’ll get through life just fine if we never pay a glance to them. There’s nothing special or sophisticated or important about “choosing” to look at one’s fish (quotes because the choice [usually unconscious] is based on emotions you didn’t choose). I’m only saying that, for me, I find it wildly amusing to stare at my fucked up fish, and that’s what I think makes me weird.